We were in the process of putting our joint office together, and it was obvious that there just wasn’t room for two printers, two scanners, and like there was before. Not only wasn’t there room on the desk, but the nearest space where room was available wasn’t easily reachable by USB cable.

We’d been thinking about replacing our color inkjet, scanner, and black and white laser printer with a single multi-function machine, but it’s not an easy thing to do. My experience with inkjet printers is that they like to be used – leave ‘em sit for too long, and you might was well throw the cartridges out and start over. On the other hand, those cartridges are expensive, so why use color for everything? Of course, having the scanner and printer in the same machine makes for a much more useful copier – the computer doesn’t have to be on to make copies. Add a card reader, and digital photos are easy to make as well. Although really, we’ve long since moved to a better source for printing photos. But they do take up a lot less space, and any new computer toy generally works a lot nicer and faster than the old one.

So the question boils down to whether the new features and convenience offset the most likely higher operating costs. I hate inkjet printers. I hate the fact that they are purely a scam to get you to buy cartridges. Cartridges that contain more ink than you’ll get to use. Cartridges that may even contain chips regulating their use to make sure you don’t get too much of your money’s worth out of them. Cartridges that usually have to be “primed” and “cleaned” to reduce the ink you can use. But, if you want color printing, you’re stuck unless you want to dump $400 or more on a color laser, which isn’t going to do photos hardly at all.

There are a ton of models out there – far more than I would think anyone could buy. I’ve had good luck with Epson, and I know they make good photos. So we ended up with their Stylus CX6600. It’s fast, quiet, and completely incompatible with the Linksys Printer Server we’d bought to enable us to put the printers on the other side of the room. So far, at least, I’ve not been able to find any way to make these two devices play together. I like Epson printers, but I really wish that instead of creating this huge special monitoring and status program, they’d just integrate things into Windows, and make something available for Linux. So at least for now, my printer server is serving only my old HP Laserjet 5l. For their part, Linksys has at least posted instructions for working with some Epson printers on their site – just not this one. I’ve emailed them, and their first response was an automated one with suggestions for how to implement file and printer sharing(?), and a few other networking tidbits. I’m guessing I misspelled the product number, and their automated system couldn’t figure out what I was asking about.

So the alternative is to leave the Epson connected via USB, and on the desktop. At least, it doesn’t jerk the desk back and forth like my old printer did, and it is quiet. I’m tempted to take the Epson back and get something that plays better with others – like a Brother. Yeah, I know, the photo printing probably isn’t as nice. We do most of our photo printing online anyway and it comes with a sheet feeder.

As our daughter’s due date looms ever closer, my wife an I have struggled with how to best rearrange our house to combine our previously separate offices into a single office. We finally decided on the new configuration, and moved everything around. The result is better, we think,but time will tell.

The point of the story is that we ended up moving both offices. Since mine was the one with all the computer gear, all of it had to be disconnected and moved. After we’d gotten things settled, I decided to work on a new layout for this site and wanted to go through our photographs. Since they amount to about 20GB, we don’t have them on every computer, and I remembered I’d moved them off my laptop onto our external 1394 “Firewire” drive. So I found the drive, and hooked it back up to the desktop. I plugged the power in, and realized I was in big trouble.

Instead of a reassuringly steady green glow, the power light was flickering. The drive wasn’t spinning (it’s pretty noisy). Maxtor’s advice was that if the drive light was flickering, the drive was bad. Disappointment turned to terror as I realized that I’d moved all of our photos (and our MP3 files) from my laptop and the desktop to this drive to make room when I was installing Linux. I had no backup.

It turns out I had made a copy on my wife’s laptop, but it was incomplete – our trip to Ireland this past summer wasn’t there, as well as some other important stuff. Normally the purpose of that extenal drive was to be the backup. Not as solid as CD’s, I know, but I was after protection from two things: drive failure and user error. A duplicate on another hard drive is good for that and fairly easy to automate – we don’t need to be able to pull up incremental copies of documents and stuff like that anyway. Set up a task to run Microsoft’s backup program, and we’re covered pretty well. But I’d managed to screw that up, and now it looked as though we’d lost quite a lot of stuff.

As took the drive apart to clean connections I realized that it was the power light that was flashing, not the drive light. Maybe it was just the power supply? I ran out to Milwaukee PC and got a new external drive enclosure – it was 50 bucks, but that seemed like a bargain. After a few minutes getting the old drive into the new enclosure I flipped the power switch and the drive spun up. I was saved! A few minutes later and redundancy was restored and my heart rate returned to normal.

I think I need to get another one of these enclosures – they are extremely handly for offloading and moving data too big to fit on a USB flash drive. They’re also a great way to use an old hard drive, or to make an accessory optical drive available to a computer that doesn’t have room for it. My desktop is a Sony slimtop, which has no room for expansion of any kind. That was why I had the external drive in the first place.

After I’d made new copies of our photos and music, I realized that we really need a convenient way to back up our laptops – preferably automatically.

My plan was that I would add another external drive, as large as our laptop drives put together, and then find some way to duplicate our laptop drives to that backup drive. I started looking at drive and file synchronization sofware like Unison (free, and multi-platform) and Vice Versa (not free, but more sophisticated, and Windows-only), but I’m realizing that this is more complicated than I thought. How do I ensure that the backup actually has a chance to complete? Our laptops aren’t always on, and it can take hours to move dozens of GB’s over a network. So instead of a service backing up the system every day at midnight, I really need something with enough smarts to realize the laptop is on, start backing up in the background without bringing everything to a halt, and will fail gracefully when the computer is suspended, hibernated or turned off.

I’m still looking, but I haven’t found the right solution yet. If anyone has a neat solution that is working for them, I’d love to hear about it!

When I started this blog the purpose wasn’t to complain about everything, but sometimes you find something so stupid, you just have to say something.

Yesterday, while we were loading up on groceries, I snuck a box of Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches into the cart. I got them out just now to heat one up, and reading the directions (yeah, I know, first mistake) I find that they start with “Thaw sandwich completely.” What totally clueless product manager who doesn’t eat breakfast thought that was ok? Who on earth is going to remember to put one of these in the fridge the night before? Who endorsed this breakfast of inconvenience?

I do that for steaks because it’s dinner, which is clearly a superior meal to breakfast and the alternative is having the “what do you want for dinner?” argument with my wife. But breakfast? Are you kidding? If I can’t chuck it in the food-nuker and eat it a few seconds later, forget it.

I know that with an elaborate scheme of lower microwave power levels, rest periods, rotation and bundling in paper towels I can nurse the morsel from frozen stasis to hot tasty treat, but I want a meal not breakfast-obstetrics.

So Steve’s advice for the day: watch the instructions on those frozen inconvenience foods. If I’d read them in the store, I would have left the product there.